Naomi Taitz Duffy

"My mother tells me that when I was very young she thought I wouldn’t be very interested in art, because while the other children were drawing pictures of dogs and houses, I was scribbling patches of color across the paper. In a way I guess I’m still doing that in a different medium. Now it’s acrylic paints, pens, and sometimes bits of collage on large and small wood panels.

My paintings have evolved over the past several years from representational oil paintings to colorful acrylic abstractions based on pattern and geometry. Even as an illustrator in college I came to realize that I was less interested in creating figurative compositions and more excited by drawing patterns on a shirt or letting the leaves on a tree take on an abstract form. My other obsession is color- I am endlessly fascinated by the way colors shift and clash when placed alongside each other, and this interest has become perhaps the most prominent aspect of my work. I’ve never been able to plan a painting in advance- even when I try the composition takes on it’s own life and I just need to follow along and listen to it."